Louis Braille

Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, France--a small town near Paris--on January 4, 1809 and when he was three he went blind, one eye having been pierced by an awl and the other became infected a few days later. When he was older, he was allowed to sit in on classes at the local school to learn what he could by listening. When he was ten he earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. At the school, the children were taught to read by feeling raised letters but they couldn't write because the printing was made with wire letters pressed onto paper. He also started learning the piano and organ. In 1821 a French army captain named Charles Barbier de la Serre visited the school and brought with him a system of writing he'd invented called night writing consisting of combinations of twelve raised dots for soldiers to use to communicate silently at night. Louis Braille realised that, if simplified, this could be useful for blind people. After several months of working on it he finally came up with a six-dotted system which he then extended to include mathematics and music. The first book in Braille was published in 1827.

Of course, the greastest obstacle to the education of the blind is their inability to read printed books. Valentin Hauy, the founder of the school in Paris which Louis was attending, had invented a system of raised letters on paper that could be read by touch. They were the letters of the standard alphabet, only embossed and raised so they could be felt. Naturally, this system was very difficult to use. The letter "I" may feel very similar to the letter "l" or the number "1".

Louis Braille became familiar with a system called "ecriture nocturne" or "night writing" devised in 1819 by a captain of the French army named Charles Barbier. Night writing used patterns of raised dots and dashes made on heavy paper. It was intended for use by soldiers who had to communicate in the dark or when silence was necessary. The soldiers could poke the dots and dashes into the paper with a stylus.

However, this system was rather complex. It wasn't based on the alphabet. Instead of corresponding to letters, the groups of dots and dashes corresponded to sounds, often requiring many codes for a single word. Though the system worked pretty well with short text, longer works would clearly become long and complicated.

Braille liked the use of raised dots in the Barbier system because it was easy to read and also easy to write. He tried to imporve the system and within three years, when he was fifteen, had come up with his own system, the basics of which are still used today. The system's popularity gradually spread throughout the world. In 1835, Louis contracted tuberculosis, which killed him shortly after his 43rd birthday in 1852.